Category Archives: Titanium Aluminide

Companies are starting to manufacture turbine blades from titanium aluminide. This makes the blades more lightweight, resulting in less energy output. A titanium aluminide blade weighs about half as much as a traditional blade made of nickel superalloy.

Ti-Al was not really used in manufacturing and production until the 2000s. One reason is that it was brittle and therefore “difficult to form and to process”. Daniel Hautmann, Titanium Aluminide–A Class All By Itself, 1 MTU Aero Engines Rept. 27 (2013). Through decades of research work, it was found that brittleness could be tackled “by adjusting the material composition, and manufacturing processes and the design were tailored to suit the material properties.” Id. at 28.

Ti-Al is now revolutionizing the field of aviation and more and more companies are working to incorporate it into their blade manufacturing technology. For instance, the Boeing 787 Dreamliner uses GE engines that include “titanium aluminide (Ti-Al) blades in the last two stages of the seven-stage low-pressure turbine.” Stephen F. Clark, 787 Propulsion System, 3 Aero Quarterly 10 (2012).